Simply Relax Into Intrinsic Awareness

Without concepts of good or bad, pleasing or displeasing, just allow the mind to relax so that there is no apprehension by an apprehender.

In this state of relaxation wherein you no longer experience the thoughts of the three times, you have gone beyond the experience of the conceptualizing intellect and you are in the awareness of rigpa, the nature of which is totally open and empty, luminously clear, and unobstructedly compassionate.

This experience is inexpressible; it is an experience of luminous nothingness. When you recognize that that is it, and you remain with it, this is rigpa – pristine awareness – it is not the mind.

“Simply relax” means that you don’t think of a single thing. You don’t generate faith or fervent regard, or give rise to virtuous thoughts, or have some devotional thought for the guru, nor do you stop thoughts, or change or obstruct them.

You don’t do anything other than just simply relax. In that state of simple relaxation, the arising of thoughts or concepts is naturally arrested, severed, as if cut off with a knife. In the moment of that experience, there is no experience of thinking about the past, anticipating the future, or being distracted in the present. One simply remains in the natural state.

“This natural state, where there is no presence of thinking mind or conceptual proliferations, is unlike one’s previous experience of mind.

In fact, it is inexpressible. It can’t even be comprehended intellectually; it is simply one’s own experience, one’s own encounter with one’s own nature, and nothing other than that.

If you try to express something about it, you can say that its essence is a vibrant nothing; it is empty, totally open and vast.

Its nature is sheer lucency, unceasing clarity.

And that experience of utter openness and clarity and yet nothing, is rigpa, intrinsic awareness.

When one is in a state of intrinsic awareness, the mind ceases to exist.

The mind is the experience of thoughts and conceptual proliferations, and nothing other than that.

That is the distinction.

When you remain in the natural state, you remain in intrinsic awareness (rigpa) that is unobstructed by the mind.